Sharing Learning with Collaborative Google Slides

The hum of engagement when students are reading and writing, and talking with each other about reading and writing. Oh, how I’ve missed it in my first 2 weeks of online teaching. (I've learned a lot, see my reports on week 1 and week 2, but it's been a bit of a slog.) Yesterday, I discovered one way to recapture the hum in Google Classroom: group Google Slides.

In the thumbnails on the left, I could see each student on his or her slide, which ones were making rapid progress and which ones weren’t. I could see when they started visiting each other’s work and several avatars grouped on a slide. I could return to the Google Meet tab and see students requesting help in the chat bar—and helping each other when I was occupied with another request.

A few days earlier, I had been looking for a way to celebrate the 6th and 7th graders’ completion of their poetry project and have them share some of their work. I had recently seen the suggestion of using Google Slides like an online bulletin board to display student work. So I created a slideshow with a title slide (see above) and 2 slides for each student, and shared it with the class. I told them to pick their favorite poem and reflection out of the 4 in their finished project, find the 2 slides with their name, and copy and paste their poem on one and their reflection on the other. Finally, they were to read all their classmates’ poems and answer the question posted in Classroom: “What was a line you found interesting and why?” 

Oh, and one thing I have found essential in this online learning environment—modeling the work for and with the students. So I picked my own favorite poem and reflection on the last 2 slides (see below).

In the process, we all continued learning about the tools. I learned that students can also present in a Google Meet. A student asked for help and said, “Can I show you my screen?” I wondered how she’d do it—with a second device, like a phone, or emailing me a screenshot (things students have resorted to before). Then suddenly I was looking at her screen! “Oh! You can present, too!” “Yes,” she said proudly, “I just found that out yesterday.” That’s when I looked back at the chat bar and found that two other students had just helped each other figure out how to make 2 columns on a slide. 

That was the most fun teaching I’ve had in the last 3 weeks! It felt familiar, like teaching used to feel. I’ll be looking for more opportunities to use group Google Slides, and for more ways to foster that kind of collaborative learning and celebration of learning.

How do you cultivate effective collaborative learning in the online environment?